The other day, I was working with an unfamiliar build and I needed to get familiar with it in a hurry. In this case, I was dealing with a makefile generated by the Perl utility h2xs, but the trick I'll show you here works any time you need to find...

At the 2009 Electric Cloud Customer Summit we introduced SparkBuild, a free gmake- and NMAKE-compatible build tool. SparkBuild is now in public beta, and several people have asked us for some more explanation: what is SparkBuild and why should I care? I thought I'd take a crack at answering those...

I've heard it said that the best programmer is a lazy programmer. I've always taken that to mean that the best programmers avoid unnecessary work, by working smarter and not harder; and that they focus on building only those features that are really required now, not allowing speculative work to...